There’s a strange paradox in the world today. Citizens in countries around the world seem angrier and are voting more—but they seem unable to effect structural changes. The political scientist Anton Jager calls this “hyperpolitics,” in which political activity increases but membership of unions and political parties is declining. Jager’s new book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences, has become something of a cult favorite among Europe’s political and intellectual elites. But is hyperpolitics necessarily bad? Does it apply only to certain Western countries—Jager’s focus—or can it capture a broader global trend? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Jager about his thesis, whether movements such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) could capture the broader Democratic Party, and also how societies should try to deepen political engagement.
The full video of our discussion can be accessed in the video box atop this page. There is also a free podcast version available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and other major platforms. What follows here is an edited and condensed transcript of our discussion.
Ravi Agrawal: So I want to start with a basic definition. What is hyperpolitics?
Anton Jager: The short answer is a three-word definition: Hyperpolitics is “re-politicization without re-institutionalization.” That is slightly academic and abstruse, so if you want to make it more concrete, hyperpolitics denotes a change in political culture in the West in which we see an increase in political activity on all kinds of fronts, whether it’s voter turnout, protest activity, or even political violence.
That increase in activity, however, has not gone hand in hand with an increase in institutional membership. As you see the politicization curve going up, you see another curve declining: membership rates for political parties, unions, and civil society organizations, both on the left and the right. This new K-shaped or X-shaped development—high politicization but low institutionalization—is a combination that doesn’t really have precedence in the 20th century. The term hyperpolitics tries to describe this new state of affairs, and it does so in contrast with two preceding other modes of political engagement: the mass politics of the 20th century, which could be very high on politicization but usually was also very institutionalized, and then the “post-politics” of the 1990s and the 2000s in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which was both low on political involvement and on institutional density and strength. Hyperpolitics is a product specifically of the 2010s and the long decade that came after the 2008 credit crash, and it really tries to explain this new situation through a hypothetical tentative term.
RA: Just to use a concrete example here, in the United States, voter turnout has been higher than ever before in the last two presidential elections. And yet union membership is much lower than it had been for most of the 20th century. And I think that kind of encapsulates the point you’re making of more politics but less investment, as it were, in terms of institutions. What is your sense of how we got here, and is it necessarily a bad thing? Because at some level, you could say that individuals feel empowered in the ability to be able to turn out to vote more, but without feeling that they have to be part of a doctrine of either the left or the right, or part of a party or a union.
AJ: As to whether hyper-politicization is a good or a bad thing, I hope the book doesn’t come across as rendering a negative judgment on the hyperpolitical era, despite its limitations and some of its contradictions, because I do think the fact that people are again politically involved, and that there’s an increase in turnout, is something that every democrat should be enthusiastic about. For example, in Germany, we now see a doubling of turnout in the upcoming election in Saxony. In 2006, it was 44 percent; now, it’s going over 80 percent. That is not a crisis of democracy—you can talk about the economic crisis in Germany, but to talk of a crisis of democracy is empirically unsustainable.
The question is, why does so much of this contemporary political activity not translate easily into concrete policy results, or why does it not so easily affect the existing power balance in society? Even as there has been an increase in turnout for U.S. elections, particularly presidential elections, it’s not very clear, for example, in U.S. inequality figures or on some of the large issues—whether it’s healthcare or certain issues of government provision—that the United States has actually made it easier for citizens to translate their preferences into policy results. There’s one spectacular example of this: There is now a long-standing majority in polling for public healthcare in the United States, but there’s actually a negative correlation between those preferences and the chances of it getting implemented. That encapsulates the hyperpolitical paradox.
RA: For people who haven’t yet read the book, let’s take a couple of examples of movements that took off in various parts of the world but weren’t able to sustain themselves. Do you want to name a few? I know, for example, Black Lives Matter (BLM) gets talked about a fair bit. What kinds of examples do you think best encapsulate your thesis?
AJ: There are a number of examples. Some of them are more chemically pure as hyperpolitical instances than the others. The BLM protests in the summer of 2020 are quite a striking example, because there are some numbers that indicate that one out of 10 American adults might have participated in them. They were the largest protests in U.S. history in purely numerical terms. You could also talk of the “yellow vest” protests from 2018 to 2020 in France, in which a group of French citizens angry at recent tax hikes—which they saw as unequally applied to parts of the working and middle class—took to the streets without an official leadership organization, but were simply recognizable through the yellow vest that every car driver in France gets with their vehicle. Once again, that was already a bit of an ideologically ambiguous movement, so it was difficult to place on the left-right spectrum.
There are also movements on the right that qualify for this criterion. Jan. 6, 2021, for example, the riot that invaded the U.S. Capitol, is a great example of right-wing hyperpolitics, and it shows once again that it’s not exclusive to the left. It was an enormously energetic and aggressive campaign, mainly organized through WhatsApp groups and then mobilized through the Twitter feed of the then-president. But at the same time, a couple of weeks later, it was very clear that none of these people had joined the same organizations, they weren’t affiliated to the same civil society groups, and they dispersed. These are a range of particularly American, but also European, instances of hyperpolitics that show that this is a phenomenon that’s now recurring. And once again, it’s not something that can be easily placed on one side of the political spectrum. It’s in the center, the left, and the right.
RA: I’m wondering, given the examples you cited, if you can make the case that the right has been more successful at the act of hyperpolitics, and having its way, than the left. Is there any truth to that thesis?
AJ: Absolutely, and the book does investigate this striking asymmetry between the left and the right in the race for hyperpolitics, and why the right seems to have done better in the hyperpolitical era than the left. I would be cautious to say that all of the movements we mentioned have a track record of really striking success. When it comes to defunding the police, or deconstructing the large carceral system—one of the largest in the world—that the United States has, the aftermath of BLM was quite ambiguous in that most of those police departments regained their funding a year later. When it comes to U.S. police violence numbers, it’s not as if there has been a marked improvement in some of those. And, of course, with Jan. 6, [Joe] Biden was sworn in as president, and later [Donald] Trump won again. It’s not entirely clear what the organizational legacy of that movement was.
But it is absolutely true that the right does seem to have done better. I think there are two simple explanations for this asymmetry. The first is that the right has access to sources of private funding when it comes to stimulating or supporting some of these hyperpolitical mobilizations, which the left simply does not.
RA: Can I challenge you there, because the right would say the left has George Soros. And the left has all these other organizations that are actually quite well-funded.
AJ: Absolutely. If you talk about the NGO [nongovernmental organization] complex or large parts of these civil society organizations that are funded by a source foundation, you could say that there is a left that has access to private funding. But I don’t see Jean-Luc Mélenchon or Jeremy Corbyn easily appealing to that kind of funding. There’s now a striking scandal in the United Kingdom with Nigel Farage, who is the leader of Reform UK—one of the new extreme-right parties that is challenging the authority of the Conservatives—who resigned from his parliamentary seat over a large sum of money he purportedly, or would have, received from a crypto-millionaire, and he stood for a new election and then won it again. It is very hard to find an equivalent of that kind of donation from a very wealthy millionaire on the left. There are cases of the left also receiving this kind of private funding; it’s just more easily available on the right.
The second point that explains asymmetry is that the left faces a steeper climb than the right in contemporary societies, and many of the issues it seeks to address want to reverse certain power relations that are much more entrenched, and much more difficult to dislodge, than the ones the right attacks. You can see this very clearly in the left-wing Syriza party in Greece. It won elections on an anti-austerity platform in 2015 and then went into a confrontation with European authorities, sought to reverse the European Union’s austerity directives, and then held a referendum which was won on a no—so the Greek people rejected the continuation of austerity and they had to continue it nonetheless. Fratelli d’Italia [Brothers of Italy], the right-wing party in Italy, initially had a highly Euroskeptic position and sought to reform the eurozone, or maybe even have Italy exit the eurozone. Now that they’ve gone into government, they’ve completely shed this ambition. When it comes to their anti-migrant promises, it’s not entirely clear that they have been able to follow up on their most ambitious ideas of, for example, deportation. That indicates that the bar is higher on the left than it is on the right, and it also means that the left is more severely punished for its failure to fulfill its promises than the right is.
RA: We’ve mostly been rooting our examples in the West. You’re very upfront in the book about how the West is what you know best, and therefore that’s what you draw on the most. But were I to ask you to stretch a little bit, I’m curious whether you think the idea of hyperpolitics applies to a country like India, for example, or even a country like China. China has the Communist Party (CCP), which has many millions of members. India has the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], which is the political wing of a group called the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh], which has tens of millions of members and is deeply rooted in society.
Do you see them as very different to the parties you’re imagining in the West? And therefore, do you think the two most populous countries in the world experience hyperpolitics as you’re describing it, or are they exceptions?
AJ: This is a very important question. I just want to highlight that the reason that my book restricts itself to the West, as you indicated, is a product of ignorance or my limited knowledge of some of these non-Western spheres. It’s not as if I don’t pay attention to them, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable extrapolating or making grand pronouncements about them.
RA: And you’re very humble about that. I really appreciate it. I wish more thinkers were that way.
AJ: The developments the book describes really begin in 2008 and 2009 with the credit crash, which has its ground zero in the United States and then quickly spirals out into Europe. But 2008 was a global event. The crash had global repercussions. You saw that already with the Arab Spring. The decade of protest didn’t open in the West. It mainly takes part in North Africa. If you look at, for example, Brazil, India, or Indonesia, you can find many examples of these really energetic and very impressive protest movements that also find their place outside of the West.
I think the Indian and the Chinese cases are, to put it bluntly, exceptions that prove the rule. The BJP in India is a real mass party, I’d say, in a classical 20th-century sense. As you say, it’s very closely connected to the RSS, and it differs from some of its extreme-right equivalents in Europe in that it has a very solid and large institutional infrastructure and a really deep civil society, which has been built up over several decades and has replaced the Congress party as the dominant party. Congress itself had become such a top-heavy party. The BJP has really replaced it as a cross-class formation. It is the largest party in the world; it has the most members in purely numerical terms. And it indicates that it is an outlier to many of the trends I describe. If you look at some of the protest movements in India in the last 10 to 15 years, you can see some of these hyperpolitical trends show up. Even the recent Cockroach movement, for example, which led to the resignation of an Indian minister, indicates that some of these trends, despite the BJP being a mass party, also affect other parts of Indian society. It is now a dominant way in which modes of opposition or protest movements also take part in a society that still has some of these mass parties.
The Chinese case is even more fascinating because the CCP is also an outlier in that it has managed to reinvent itself as some kind of mass party, particularly after COVID. The pandemic really served as an occasion for the CCP to reinsert itself, particularly in the lower levels of society, also through surveillance, of course. But the CCP is also a cross-class party; it really has a cohesive function in the Chinese elite itself. The Chinese business elite and party elite are pushed much closer together. If you’re wealthy in China, it’s very likely that your biography is still very closely tied to the CCP. And that also explains why the kind of hyperpolitics we’ve seen in the West and the type of populism we’ve seen in the last 10 to 15 years hasn’t manifested in China in the same way. One explanation is obviously just repression. The Chinese state is more effective at quelling dissent. I don’t think that explains everything. There are spectacular growth rates that buy you consent. There is repression. But there is also the CCP as this mediator between the lower ranks of Chinese society and the higher parts of the Chinese business class. That probably explains why hyperpolitics, as it exists and manifests in the West, isn’t as visible in China as it used to be, even if there were anti-lockdown protests or protests against zero-COVID in China. When it comes to labor unrest, the official numbers actually don’t show the extent of what’s going on. But I do think it kind of proves the trend. The CCP has managed to reinvent itself as this mediating party and thereby indicates that it is the absence of these kinds of structures in the West that probably explains why hyperpolitics is more prevalent.
RA: Fascinating. I have one last question for you. How do you develop an environment of compromise and civility? What systems, apart from just voting, can people and parties build to deliver the political consequences they so clearly want?
AJ: Well, if this is a question about political violence specifically, I’ll just indicate that part of the hyperpolitical thesis does apply to the dynamics of political violence: There have been more attempts on Trump’s life than any previous presidential election. We can also see that someone like Luigi Mangione decided to take action into his own hands, instead of collective action or a campaign of Medicare for All. I do think that a decrease in political violence, which some people in the United States now desire, is only going to come if there are actual policy results. As I said, there is a large majority in the United States for something like public healthcare. There is a negative correlation between that public preference and the chances of it getting implemented as a policy. If Washington becomes more responsive to those preferences, I think you’ll probably see a decrease in some of these types of political violence.
RA: But that’s very chicken and egg.
AJ: Probably, but I do think the reason that American citizens are looking more toward political violence is because it does seem to be the last avenue they have available. They are voting more, they’re protesting more, but it’s not very clear that that is translating into a different gradient of social and political power. And if that gradient is not being affected, they will look to more individualized, desperate solutions. And I think Mangione and even other types of right-wing violence certainly fall into that category.
RA: Hyperpolitics obviously is a trend. Do you think it has peaked? Will it peak soon? In other words, I’m just trying to get us toward, if a clear solution isn’t available, is there at least an end to the trend line?
AJ: The problem here is that predicting something in social science is very difficult. I’m very uncomfortable with these astrological claims that say “hyperpolitics will be over next year or will only last for five years.” I just want to insist that the structural drivers of hyperpolitics that this book identifies are very deep-seated, quite old, and I don’t see them going away anytime soon.
The real question is: Will someone find an institutional formula that moves us beyond hyperpolitics in the next five to 10 years? I don’t think that’s impossible. You can already see attempts on the left and the right—whether it’s DSA or the second Trump term, which is very different from the first Trump term, much more institutionalized, much more organized, such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 or the way ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] has been mobilized. So there are attempts at making that political activity more institutional. Whether that will mean hyperpolitics will be history next year or in five years or in 10 years—I’m not able to say. That is an open question, and people make their own decisions.